Spotlight
Rachel Stohl Joins the Managing Across Boundaries Program
October 27, 2011
International arms trade expert Rachel Stohl joined the Stimson Center early this October, as a Fellow with the Managing Across Boundaries Program. In this role, Stohl will assist project director Brian Finlay in building Stimson's profile and outreach efforts to address the global arms trade and the illicit trafficking of small arms.
"I couldn't be more excited to be working with a program that aims to develop and facilitate innovative responses to cross cutting threats caused by the uncontrolled and illicit proliferation of conventional weapons," says Stohl. "Joining Stimson will allow me to better contribute to the growing policy dialogue on these important issues."
Stohl comes to Stimson from Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, where she was an Associate Fellow from 2009-2011. Her areas of expertise focus on issues relating to the international arms trade, including small arms and light weapons, as well as children and armed conflict.
She spent more than a decade working as a senior analyst at the Center for Defense Information in Washington, D.C, from 1998-2009. Stohl is currently the consultant to the UN ATT process, and was previously the consultant to the UN Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) on the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) in 2008, and the UN Register for Conventional Arms in 2009.
"The unchecked proliferation of small arms and light weapons around the globe is not only a catastrophic human disaster, it poses a direct threat to international security by weakening states structures, providing critical financing to terrorists and criminal organizations, and ultimately driving the need for foreign military intervention," said Finlay. "Outside of government circles, I can think of no one more capable, nor more committed to addressing these challenges than Rachel Stohl. She is unquestionably the preeminent expert on the global arms trade in this country."
Stohl holds an MA in international policy studies from the Monterey Institute of International Studies and an honors BA in political science and German from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Click here to read Stohl's full biography.
Selected works include:
The International Arms Trade (Polity Press, 2009)
The Beginners Guide to the Small Arms Trade (Oneworld Publishing, 2009)
"Obama Neglects Child Soldiers," The
Hill, Oct. 12, 2011
"U.S. Policy and the Arms Trade Treaty," Working Paper 10-1, Project Ploughshares, April 2010